The present invention is related to a method of creating spatial diversity in wireless communication networks.
Wireless communication systems have exploded in popularity in recent years. Cellular phones, pagers, and more recently Bluetooth devices all take advantage of these wireless communication systems. A common obstacle to wireless communications is a phenomenon known as fading, where messages transmitted between two units in the system are lost or garbled.
One technique to combat fading is using diversity schemes such as a spatial transmit diversity scheme. Transmit diversity schemes send at least two signals from distinct antennas or antenna elements. The signals contain parts or all of the same message. The goal of transmit diversity it to alleviate the effects of fading. The signals are transmitted in such a way that they do not cancel each other at the receiver. The receiver can process the signals to exploit diversity and improve performance. Transmit diversity can be viewed as a dual of traditional receive diversity, where signals from multiple receive antennas are processed by the receiver. Transmit and receive diversity can also be used together to obtain further improvements. Transmit diversity methods include delay diversity, the Alamouti code, the Lindskog-Paulraj technique, space-time codes, BLAST, and other similar methods. Some transmit diversity schemes require multiple transmit antennas, which may be difficult to implement in small, inexpensive wireless devices. For example, Bluetooth devices typically have a single transmit antenna operative in the Bluetooth frequency band.